The lists, the lists are driving me bleedin' insane!

We'll get to the lists in a while. By way of intro, Malcolm was considering Mick Fealty, Lord of the Manor at Slugger O'Toole, trying to extrapolate from the Willie O'Dea resignation to a metaphysical consideration of how the media mediate (or, in the O'Dea case, how the establishment manage to ignore an imminent train-crash).

Those a whit distant from recent happenings in Caitlín Ní Uallacháin's right little, tight little Three Green Fields might need a quick update.

O'Dea! Oh, dear!

O'Dea (above, right) has been one of the cuter characters in recent Fianna Fáil history. He is, among that mixed bag of intellects, quite a bright guy: a lawyer and accountant. He has lectured at tertiary level, and remains a columnist for several Irish prints. He has been a TD for some three decades, was distinguished as one of Charlie Haughey's intra-party opponents, and has the throat of Limerick politics in a vampire bite.

For the last six years he was Minister of Defence in two Fianna Fáil governments: not in itself a great mark of distinction. O'Dea had done some good work at Education; and might reasonably have expected a better post. After all, Ministry of Defence is hardly the grandest office of state in the Twenty-Six Counties. Still, a FF Cabinet has to be a balance of many regional and ideological conflicting interests: O’Dea happened to tick many boxes. Moreover, the man evidently relished and cavorted in the job.

Then, in a local election campaign, O'Dea confided to a journalist that a prominent Sinn Féin candidate (subsequently re-elected) was involved in the running of a brothel. Ahem!

O'Dea at first denied he had made such an allegation, and swore to the same in an affidavit, only to be confronted with a recording of him doing just that. Oops!

Last December, the matter came to Court. The affidavit stood. Then O'Dea had to make a crawling apology, a specious excuse, and cough up a six-figure sum (according to the Sunday Times). Ouch!

Finally, the Opposition made an issue of the matter. Part of the delay is that Dáil Éireann has become a part-time legislature: part because nobody in the small world of Irish politics likes to stir noxious turds, lest they come back to haunt.

Last week, under pressure from Fine Gael (getting under the bar five seconds before Labour), the Cowen Government went for a vote-of-confidence. The government scraped home on the Ceann Comhairle's casting vote. Half a dozen TD's managed to absent themselves: Trevor Sargent of the Greens managed to be pre-booked for an unmissable engagement ... at an organic food fair. Indeed. Sargent's inability to attend could be typical of the Green point-of-view: they felt they had been "bounced" into the vote-of-confidence by Cowen.

O'Dea then resigned. There remains considerable contention about whether he walked, was pushed, or if indeed the Greens gave an ultimatum. If so, for once, the Greens were less of their usual “more of a dirty yellow colour” (© The Goon Show).

Listing to lunacy

None of that is directly relevant to Malcolm's other thought. This emerged from Fealty's philosophising about how the media, by inclusion, omission or emphasis, mediate the public agenda.

There is little new, or particularly profound in this. The mediaeval illiterate peasant was constrained to a horizon bounded by local gossip, the local parish priest's semi-literate theology, and the occasional passing pedlar. As information sources have grown exponentially, we increasingly and necessarily impose filters for ourselves. So we choose our sources by interest, by prejudice and by habit: Fox News or Russia Today, the Irish Times or the Miami Herald, Gay News or L'Osservatore Romano. Only one of which will have addressed the O'Dea business.

Malcolm, inevitably, found himself further trivialising the argument by considering the media's mania for lists. This is the particular unique-selling-point of the arts and entertainment pages, ultimately reduced to that inevitable five-star ranking.

At the eggheaded end, the likes of the Times Literary Supplement each Thursday not only reviews but fails to do so. This prescribes the scope of what literature is "acceptable" to that particular periodical and its adherents. That matters little, since there are other competing outlets, though it is clear that certain writers are "established" by being featured in those pages, while others are excluded. Reviews are inevitably nuanced: very few say"must read" and equally few are stinkers — though, last week, Heather O'Donoghue's magisterial belittling of Robert Ferguson was a gem.

At the popular="pop" end, the need to encapsulate creates more serious problems.

At its best, such an approach can be a classic: Walter Kerr's 1951 put down, for the New York Herald Tribune, of John Van Druten's I Am a Camera ("Me no Leica") being the gold standard, as acerbic as anything from Dorothy Parker. The effect of Kerr's cryptic comment depends considerably on the reader recognising that I am a Camera is adapted from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin experiences. And, in turn, went on to be the basis for the phenomenon that was the musical and film Cabaret): thus producing the curious sequence of a decent pair of books provoking a mediocre stage adaptation and a great movie:



But those lists!

Yeah, well take the nadir achieved by Rachel Campbell-Johnson doing the "New Shows" for the Playlist supplement of last Saturday's Times. This is a page headlined by Henry Moore at Tate Britain, with Ron Arad featured further down page. We are also invited to consider posters from the wartime Ministry of Food, at the Imperial War Museum, and the Design Awards at the Design Museum. To this mish-mash, Campbell-Johnson appends a side bar of her "Critic's Choice". To achieve the full depth of the bizarre, these are worth taking in the reverse order established by Miss World competitions:
5. Dexter Dalwood's paintings and collages ... exploring the concept of "history painting" at Tate St Ives;
4. "Rembrandt in Focus", which sounds like making a commercial for a brand of make-up, but is a single portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet [left] on loan from Penrhyn Castle, together with etchings at the National Museum of Wales;
3. A major show of more than 120 images spanning the 70-year career of Irving Penn , at the National Portrait Gallery;
2. We are invited to Gaze into the giddily decorative surfaces of some of the best-known works of Chris Ofill (yes: the elephant turd man) at Tate Modern; and ...
1. Work by the the Armenian immigrant whose paintings were as powerful and important as he was mysterious. That's the typographic-disaster-waiting-to-happen, Arshile Gorky ("crazy guy! crazy name!" © Glenda Slagg), also at Tate Modern. Why is Malcolm unimpressed by this one, when opposite is a full page advertisement for a Times+ "exclusive private view" at £10 a ticket?

Any way one addresses it, there's a fair bit of mediation being done there.

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Revenge enjoyed cold

Joe Joyce, mining the archives of the Irish Times as part of that paper's 150th anniversary, today looks back to 23rd June 1945. He hits on the regular Irishman's Diary column, on that day

written by the paper's editor, Bertie Smyllie, under his pen name, Nichevo.

Expect sparks.

Smyllie was the Irish Times for the twenty years of his editorship (above left); and his paper was pro-Allies, and anti-Fascist.

This led to endless battles of wits with the wartime censorship, who saw Smyllie as a constant threat to Ireland's strict neutrality.

Forbidden to report war casualties, Irishmen serving in the Royal Navy would be reported having suffered a "boating accident". Even on VE-day, when censorship still prevented Smyllie celebrating, at the last moment he famously had the front page re-set so the portraits of the Allied war leaders formed a distinctive V-for-victory (image, right).

Here, at length, respectfully, is "Nichevo":

The British often have been accused of lack of imagination, and even their best friends must admit that sometimes this charge is based on fact.

Nobody can accuse me of lack of sympathy with Johnnie Bull; but when I read that William Joyce was being arraigned on a charge of High Treason, under some Act going back to the Flood, I must confess that I got a bit of a shock.

“If François Villon were the King of France” runs the old verse. I should like to write another, entitled “If Nichevo were the Prime Minister of England”.

What would I do? Quite a few things. But at the present moment probably the first thing I would do would be to drop the charge of treason against William Joyce, and include him in the next Honours List.

I would make Mr Joyce a Peer, conferring upon him the title of Lord Haw-Haw of Hamburg! And I mean that! It has been said that this and that individual “won the war” for the Allies; but in my humble opinion, no man did more to keep the morale of the British people up to the mark than this self-same William Joyce.

For the purposes of my argument, let me take myself as a typical adherent of the Allied cause, although technically, through no fault of my own, I was a neutral.

What happened? Simply this. Whenever I felt depressed at the bad news that from time to time – and how often? – came from the fighting fronts, all that I had to do to restore my equilibrium and to put me in good form again was to tune into Radio Bremen, Hamburg, and the rest, and listen for a few minutes to our old friend Liam of Galway. (By the way, was there not such a person among the crew of Christopher Columbus’s ship some years ago?)

“Haw-Haw” always acted on me as a tonic. Either he made me violently angry, or else he made me, like little Audrey, just “laff and laff”.

That is the true, the blushful hippocrene. It reminds us that the Irish soul of wit often requires a sole, a boot, a toe and an arse to kick. In passing, the "little Audrey" reference, which makes little sense nowadays, was a knowing reference to a variant on the "as the actress said to the bishop" double-entendre.

Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow

Was there, behind Smyllie's little romance, an element of knowing truth?

By the end of the War, the Irish Department of External Affairs had a lot of fence-mending to do. The "Lord Haw-Haw" problem was one issue. There was also the nasty Charles Bewley (of the important Dublin Quaker family; but a convert to Catholicism and a Nazi sympathiser) and the thoroughly loathsome Francis Stuart (as culpable as "our old friend, Liam of Galway", but married to Iseult, daughter of Maud Gonne-MacBride).

Bewley had been Ireland's Minister in Berlin from 1932 until he was hastily recalled in 1939. Even then Bewley continued to supply dubious and subjective intelligence to the Germans, and apparently expected a high position when the Nazis occupied Ireland.

When the Götterdämmerung of April 1945 ensured that Bewley's hopes and his heroes were finally and felicitously expunged, he took refuge in the Vatican. He had no papers, no passport, and (since he lacked 15 years service) no pension. He petitioned Dublin for a diplomatic passport, which he felt was what his dignity required.

As the story goes, after long consideration, Dublin did indeed issue him with a document. The Bewley family name weighed heavily enough to ensure that the request could not be ignored. A subtle intellect in the Department concocted a solution. In "description" in the document was inserted "a person of no importance". Poor Bewley, whose overweening ego was crushed and humiliated by this, was subsequently unable to present himself at any frontier.

Francis Stuart was less well served. When, post-War, he fell foul of the French, he was simply refused a passport. Sphere: Related Content

Mrs Mooseblaster's book bag


As so often in the life-and-times of Governor Sarah Palin (left, with irony), there seem to be variations embroidered on a theme.

Garance Burke, for AP, seems to have as straight an account as we have yet had:

Shortly after taking office in 1996 as mayor of Wasilla, a city of about 7,000 people, Palin asked the city's head librarian about banning books. Later, the librarian was notified by Palin that she was being fired, although Palin backed off under pressure. Palin's alleged attempt at book-banning has been a matter of intense interest since Republican presidential nominee John McCain named her as his running mate last month. Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said Thursday [11th September] that Palin asked the head librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, on three occasions how she would react to attempts at banning books. He said the questions, in the fall of 1996, were hypothetical and entirely appropriate. He said a patron had asked the library to remove a title the year before and the mayor wanted to understand how such disputes were handled. Records on the city's Web site, however, do not show any books were challenged in Wasilla in the 10 years before Palin took office.

That same article indicates that one book may have been at the centre of this dispute:

The Rev. Howard Bess, a liberal Christian preacher in the nearby town of Palmer, said the church Palin and her family attended until 2002, the Wasilla Assembly of God, was pushing to remove his book from local bookstores.

Emmons told him that year that several copies of "Pastor I Am Gay" had disappeared from the library shelves, Bess said.

That's book-banning and homophobia.
So far, Mrs Mooseblaster, you're on a roll.

Pastor Bess is now "retired": that is "retired" as in defenestrated via:

the threats, intimidation and his eventual forced retirement and his church's excommunication from the American Baptists over his stances on LGBT issues and that book.

Now David Talbot (the onlie true begetter of salon.com) has interviewed Bess and gives a full account (which, of course, should be read in full):

When it was published in 1995, Bess' book caused an immediate storm in the Mat-Su Valley, an evangelical stronghold dotted with storefront churches. Conservative ministers targeted the book, and the only bookstore in the valley that dared to stock it -- Shalom Christian Books and Gifts – soon dropped it after the owner was barraged with angry phone calls. The Frontiersman, the local newspaper that ran a column by Bess for seven years, fired him and ran a vicious cartoon that suggested even drooling child molesters would be welcomed by Bess' church.

And after she became mayor of Wasilla, according to Bess, Sarah Palin tried to get rid of his book from the local library. Palin now denies that she wanted to censor library books, but Bess insists that his book was on a "hit list" targeted by Palin. "I'm as certain of that as I am that I'm sitting here. This is a small town, we all know each other. People in city government have confirmed to me what Sarah was trying to do."

But it goes further than bigots bashing their Bibles over a book:

Soon after the book controversy, Bess found himself again at odds with Palin and her fellow evangelicals. In 1996, evangelical churches mounted a vigorous campaign to take over the local hospital's community board and ban abortion from the valley. When they succeeded, Bess and Dr. Susan Lemagie, a Palmer OB-GYN, fought back, filing suit on behalf of a local woman who had been forced to travel to Seattle for an abortion. The case was finally decided by the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled that the hospital must provide valley women with the abortion option.

At one point during the hospital battle, passions ran so hot that local antiabortion activists organized a boisterous picket line outside Dr. Lemagie's office, in an unassuming professional building across from Palmer's Little League field. According to Bess and another community activist, among the protesters trying to disrupt the physician's practice that day was Sarah Palin.

Mrs Mooseblaster's Wasilla, let us remind ourselves, is where women were expected to pay for the medical examination necessary in reporting a rape to the local police:

Despite denials by the Palin campaign, new evidence proves that as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin had a direct hand in imposing fees to pay for post-sexual assault medical exams conducted by the city to gather evidence...

Under Sarah Palin's administration, Wasilla cut funds that had previously paid for the medical exams and began charging victims or their health insurers the $500 to $1200 fees... Palin, as mayor, fired police chief Irl Stambaugh and replaced him with Charlie Fannon, who with Palin's knowledge, slashed the budget for the exams and began charging the city's victims of sexual assault. The city budget documents demonstrate Palin read and signed off on the new budget. A year later, alarmed Alaska lawmakers passed legislation outlawing the practice.

That leaves only the obvious:

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. "She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board," said Munger, a music composer and teacher. "I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, 'Sarah, how can you believe in creationism -- your father's a science teacher.' And she said, 'We don't have to agree on everything.'

"I pushed her on the earth's creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she'd seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them."

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. "She looked in my eyes and said, 'Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'"

That same report carries a tit-bit, which suggests someone close to Mrs Mooseblaster is a student of the early career of the lifelong anti-Semite Tricky Dicky Nixon:

The mayor of Wasilla before Sarah Palin, John C. Stein, was also a Republican, though the office was and continues to be non-partisan. Mayor Stein was defeated by Sarah Palin in a campaign that brought in the NRA, Republican partisans, and a whisper campaign that Mayor Stein was Jewish (he is a Christian, but is "proud of such a reputation").

And the Seattle Times has a similar story:

... a TV station called her Wasilla's "first Christian mayor." This prompted a letter from Stein, saying: "Really?" He listed eight previous mayors, all Christian, and added: "With a name like 'Stein' some suspected that I must be a non-Christian, have non-Christian blood or at least have sympathized with a non-Christian sometime in my career. I'm proud of such a reputation but I, my family and forbearers are of the Christian persuasion, too."

Why it all matters:

Three of the four candidates (for President and Veep) have undergone years of national public scrutiny; and survived reasonably unscathed. By all accounts, and on the quantum of evidence available, they are honourable public respresentatives.

Mrs Mooseblaster came from nowhere. Therefore, she and her history deserve considerable investigation. What that investigation is exposing is not nice.

Intolerance

Malcolm has one excellent reason for distrusting anyone who is totally convinced about anything: there is always an element of doubt.

Not so, for the Mrs Mooseblasters of this world. They have this hot-line to the Ultimate Authority.

Mrs Mooseblaster and minions took over the town council and tried to use it to impose her prejudices on the local library. When that didn't quite work, she tried to boot the librarian. When that didn't work, she froze the library's budget (we are talking about the vast sum of $70,000 here).

The town of Wasilla went further into the mire with Mayor Mooseblaster's hockey-hall (a.k.a.Wasilla Multi-Use Sports Complex, though its main function seems to revolve around the Alaska Avalanche ice-hockey franchise). This is a 2,500-seater stadium, orignally for a town of no much more than twice that number. It was costed at some $14M, but went over-budget because Mayor Mooseblaster and her Council cocked up the ownership of the land on which it was erected. As a result, the library budget is still being squeezed so there will be no new stock (and, curiously, the local library blog-site has been taken off-line).

Then it was the turn of the local hospital. Again, fundamentalist pro-life views were preferred to any legalistic punctilio.

In passing, the local School Board got the treatment: we must have creationism on the curriculum! Except, of course, that would run against the writ of the Supreme Court. So, a quick snowshoe shuffle:

During a 2006 debate, she said she was a proponent of teaching both evolution and creationism in schools. She later clarified her stance in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News, saying that she doesn't think creationism needed to be part of the curriculum and that she would not push the state Board of Education to add such alternatives to the state's required curriculum.

As Malcolm has discovered from recent threads on Slugger O'Toole (no, there's no debate: just blind obfuscation), creationism must be the total unquestioned truth because darwinism cannot explain everything ("D'oh!"). Certainty is all, sayeth the Lord's interpolators.

What these threads show is a total inability to accept scientific method. In this demi-monde of banality, human knowledge is finite; and cannot be expanded beyond the writing of Genesis 1.1:

Each new false religion of the post-Flood period has sought to detract from our Creator and from our responsibilities in this life; evolution's effect is no different and it (macro-evolution) continues to lack any scientific substance. Pray about this!

Then, it’s a small jump from saying "we don’t yet understand" to assuming "we won’t ever understand".

Malcolm recalls that there are too many good thinkers who ended up frying on religious bonfires (Giordano Bruno, for one notable example) because Mother Church extrapolated from don’t to won’t to shouldn’t try to understand. And that’s why he finds creationism is truly dangerous: after all,

if there can be no doubt about the origins of life,
the universe and everything,
we must stop people destroying their immortal souls
by looking for forbidden knowledge.

Over to you, Mrs Mooseblaster.

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No Red, nor White,
just Blue pencil

There are few things that bring Malcolm to the eye-bulging stage. This one did (but, as usual, there will be a longueur before he explains why).

He was re-reading bits of Tim Pat Coogan's rightly-celebrated biography of Éamon de Valera, and found something that his previous reads had missed.

For St Patrick's Day, 1943, de Valera made a broadcast on Radio Éireann.

As Coogan says:

This was the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Gaelic League by Douglas Hyde. Hyde was still President of the Twenty-six Counties but had suffered a stroke, and de Valera was active throughout the country in attending Gaelic League commemorations of various sorts. In between these activities, bending laws, signing death warrants and internment orders, and fending off Churchill, Hitler and Roosevelt, de Valera went on air ...

Nothing in de Valera's entire public career ever drew anything like the comment and ridicule that that speech, made in those circumstances elicited over the years.

a land ... with cosy homesteads

The most celebrated passage of the speech is:

The Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of a right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youth, and the laughter of happy maidens; whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.

Malcolm's belief is well and truly beggared that de Valera could produce such fatuity. It was, after all, the historical moment of Stalingrad, the Montgomery-Rommel dance-of-death across North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic, and Guadalcanal -- for only a few instances. Irishmen, and Irish/Irish-American gore were being expended in at least three of those theatres.

De Valera, of course, also chose to ignore the emigration from Ireland to war-work in British factories. This amounted to 200,000 as the outflow was studiously recorded by the Irish Civil Service. Later, in 1953, when it suited him, he could just as easily rediscover concern for the economic and moral plight of the Irish working in England.

... the laughter of happy maidens

The "transhumance" (a word Malcolm recollects from his Geography classes, now half a century gone) of Irish men to jobs in England was well established. War-time brought something new: not just an increase in men leaving their families (who were now no longer permitted to accompany them), but the steady out-flow of Irish single women (de Valera's "happy maidens", indeed) -- not to menial jobs and "service" any more, but to skilled employment in the blitzed cities of Britain:

in 1940 a total of 15,542 females were issued [exit] permits of whom 1,634 were going to employment in the field of nursing.

And this was the start of a continuing trend. Month by month, William Norton of the Labour Party seems to ask the same question, and receive a similar reply:

in March 1945 1,234 travel permits were issued to women.

On a previous occasion, Malcolm suggested there were "push" and "pull" factors at work here. The "pull" was obviously financial, though we should not dismiss the risks and personal circumstances that involved. The "push" was the climate back home, and a choice to liberate themselves, again at personal cost.

De Valera's 1937 Constitution had awarded women a special place, which was "duties in the home". Article 41:

... the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.
The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.

What had been a commonplace for Kaiser Wilhelm II, by the time Hitler came to pronounce it to the National Socialist Women's Organization in September 1934 it was a trifle shopsoiled. Yet, Kinder, Küche, Kirche remained de Valera's view of a stable society. Or, in more recent unvarnished redneck:

I'll tell you what we do up there when one of our women starts poking around in something she doesn't know anything about. We get her an extra milk cow. If that don't work, we give her a little more garden to tend. And if that's not enough, we get her pregnant and keep her barefoot.

... the basis of a right living

On 1st September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, and all European hell broke out. De Valera, next day, put two Bills through Dáil Éireann. The first amended the Constitution to allow an "Emergency". The second was the Emergency Powers Bill. By the 3rd September both were enacted; and de Valera had awarded himself:

administrative power over everything in the state: censorship, military matters, supplies, agriculture and transport.

It is the first item on that list which might cause us to diagnose Malcolm for Graves' disease.

..the life that God desires that men should live

De Valera's St Patrick's Day fantasy was so unworldly it belongs in the farthest reaches of rationality, and was severely dislocated from the blood and mud of 1943. It severely provoked the US Minister in Dublin, David Gray, who was Roosevelt's personal appointee and friend.

Gray, as Cormac O'Grada recounts, was wholly frustrated by de Valera's notion of Irish neutrality:

If Britain completely cuts off coal and gasoline, this place would be a disorganised and howling wilderness in three months ... it probably would be a wise thing to do to explode this nationalistic dream of self-sufficiency.

The relationship between de Valera and Gray quickly became one of mutual antipathy. This may have inspired de Valera's infamous visit to the German ministry, on 2nd May 1945, to express his condolence on Hitler's death. De Valera did so on a personal decision, and categorically against the advice of his own officials, to acknowledge the "irreproachable" behaviour of German Minister Hempel throughout the war years "in marked contrast" to that of Gray.

On the other side, Gray could have become aware (via the British eavesdroppers) that in 1940 Hempel had cabled Berlin, relaying de Valera's disapproval of Roosevelt's re-election. For certain, Brian Girvin refers to a November 1940 letter by Gray to Roosevelt:

[Gray] thought it queer that not a single member of Fianna Fáil offered congratulations on the election outcome, while noting that the papal nuncio had predicted that Roosevelt would lose. All of this puzzled Gray and he speculated, there has been some dirty work at the crossroads.

... devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit

Now, to our frustration of any hope of him reaching his point, Malcolm diverts to the cinema.

By 1943 Hollywood was fully mobilised to winning the war. Casablanca was just one of the earlier, though certainly the greatest of these celluloid bloodless assaults on the foe. A few months after Casablanca came the deservedly-less-celebrated Good Luck, Mr Yates:

... a teacher at a military school is derided by his students because he has not joined the military. The man is deeply disturbed by their ridicule and disrespect and so pleads with the draft-board to reconsider his "essential" status and allow him to join. He is allowed to enlist, but still, because he has a punctured ear-drum, is not allowed to join. Unable to face his students, the teacher gets a job at a shipyard, then deceives his students into believing that he is at war by having a buddy at boot camp forward their letters to him. Soon ugly rumors begin to circulate amongst the suspicious students. One is that their teacher went AWOL. The other is that he is really a Nazi spy. The students' actions threaten to destroy the teacher's new romance with a female welder. In the end everything comes out hunky-dory when the teacher proves himself a courageous hero during a shipyard fire.

The punch-line! (At last!)

The Emergency Powers Act, the fuel shortage, de Valera's neutrality all came together in an explosion of Gray's fury, in a letter to Roosevelt:

Meanwhile the Censor is loose again. The American flag was recently cut out of a film called Good Luck Mr. Yates ... Meanwhile I am surrounded by mountains of turf, some two hundred and fifty thousand tons, all brought from the interior with American gasoline. If I go nuts can you blame me?

The Irish dared to censor Old Glory? No wonder Malcolm went pug-eyed.

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